The world drinks a lot of wine, and that means a lot of grapes are consumed every year. But not every part of the grape ends up in the bottle. Seeds, stalks and skins—roughly a quarter of the grapes —- are typically discarded ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: Interest in human evolution has stimulated new geological work in the southern rift valley of Kenya. A new Geological Society of America Bulletin article by Anna K. Behrensmeyer and colleagues presents ...

More than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci sketched what he called "la turbolenza," comparing chaotic swirls atop flowing water to curly human hair. It turns out those patterns influence myriad phenomena, from the drag on ...

The world's leading brands of bottled water are contaminated with tiny plastic particles that are likely seeping in during the packaging process, according to a major study across nine countries published Wednesday.

A team led by scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) has demonstrated that the excess carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere ...

Ocean acidification will severely impair coral reef growth before the end of the century if carbon dioxide emissions continue unchecked, according to new research on Australia's Great Barrier Reef led by Carnegie's Ken Caldeira ...

When an earthquake strikes, nearby seismometers pick up its vibrations in the form of seismic waves. In addition to revealing the epicenter of a quake, seismic waves can give scientists a way to map the interior structures ...

The extreme wet and dry periods Mongolia has experienced in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are rare but not unprecedented and future droughts may be no worse, according to an international research team that includes ...

Mixed-plastic electronics waste could be a valuable source of reusable polymers, a new study led by Illinois Sustainability Technology Center scientists suggests. The team has developed the first energy-efficient and environmentally ...

A team of researchers from across Europe has found that rising temperatures due to global warming have been causing more avalanches in the Western Himalayas than in the past. In their paper published in Proceedings of the ...

Salinity in the North Atlantic dropped dramatically over the last decade, according to a new study that used data from a floating network of sensors to get the most detailed picture yet of changing ocean conditions in the ...

Paying rural villagers to cut down fewer trees boosts conservation not only while the payments are being made but even after they're discontinued, according to a new CU Boulder study involving 1,200 tropical forest users ...

Deep convection in the North Atlantic is one of the key components of large-scale ocean circulation. Based on long-term observations, scientists from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel have now demonstrated ...

Urbanization has taken billions of people from the rural countryside to urban centers, adding pressure to existing water resources. Many cities rely on renewable freshwater regularly refilled by precipitation, rather than ...

A trio of researchers at the University of Manchester has found that flash floods in the U.K. carried massive amounts of microplastics from rivers and streams to the ocean. In their paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, ...

Nutrient-rich ash from an enormous flare-up of volcanic eruptions toward the end of the dinosaurs' reign kicked off a chain of events that led to the formation of shale gas and oil fields from Texas to Montana.

Programs in which people pay landholders to support natural systems that provide benefits like flood protection, biodiversity and carbon storage, are expanding around the world, according to a new UCLA-led study.

How does the sound of a tiny Earth tremor differ from the sound of a huge passing whale? That is one of the things that scientists had to figure out while listening for the sound of methane release from the sea floor.

In Jakarta, the rich have much better access to clean water than the poor. Residents in the city's business districts or in rich neighbourhoods have much more reliable access to water than those living in poor neighbourhoods.

Tropical dry forests are being increasingly recognized as conclusive indicators of climate change, thanks in part thanks to a monitoring system recognized as one of the world's best climate research projects.

More Arctic sea ice is entering the North Atlantic Ocean than before, making it increasingly dangerous for ships to navigate those waters in late spring, according to new research led by the University of Manitoba.

Great cities need trees to be great places, but urban changes put pressure on the existing trees as cities develop. As a result, our rapidly growing cities are losing trees at a worrying rate. So how can we grow our cities ...

Beneath the crystal-clear waters of the Indian Ocean island nation of the Seychelles, a fight is growing to save the coral reefs that shelter a range of creatures, from tiny invertebrates to the sprawling octopus, from climate ...

On the seafloor of the shallow coastal regions north of Siberia, microorganisms produce methane when they break down plant remains. If this greenhouse gas finds its way into the water, it can also become trapped in the sea ...

Governments should focus on "greener" policies to improve the supply and quality of water as climate change and a growing global population threaten the water security of billions, the United Nations said on Monday.

South African winemaker Marlize Jacobs looks out across the parched brown earth that sustains her award-winning vines, surveying the effects of the water crisis ravaging Cape Town and surrounding areas.

The only UN-approved financial mechanism to curb deforestation, a key driver of global warming, has bulldozed the rights of forest-dwelling peoples on three continents and needs to be fixed, experts say.

Every day more than 1,000 water tankers rumble past Nagraj's small plywood store in Bangalore, throwing up clouds of dust as they rush their valuable cargo to homes and offices in India's drought-stricken tech hub.

Airborne soot produced by wildfires and fossil-fuel combustion and transported to the remote McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica contains levels of black carbon too low to contribute significantly to the melting of local glaciers, ...

Researchers have designed carbon aerogels that can be reversibly stretched to more than three times their original length, displaying elasticity similar to that of a rubber band. By adding reversible stretchability to aerogels' ...

Measuring the mass of a celestial body is one of the most challenging tasks in observational astronomy. The most successful method uses binary systems because the orbital parameters of the system depend on the two masses. ...

A team of researchers from Korea, the U.K. and Denmark has found fossilized brains of sea creatures that lived during the Cambrian explosion. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes ...

On Nov. 11, 2014, a global network of telescopes picked up signals from 300 million light years away that were created by a tidal disruption flare—an explosion of electromagnetic energy that occurs when a black hole rips ...

This year's unexpectedly aggressive flu season reminds everyone that although the flu vaccine can reduce the number of people who contract the virus, it is still not 100 percent effective. Researchers report that a tweak ...

Millions of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans are performed each year to diagnose health conditions and perform biomedical research. The different tissues in our bodies react to magnetic fields in varied ways, allowing ...

For centuries, scientists and scholars have measured the influence of individuals and discoveries through citations, a crude statistic subject to biases, politics and other distortions. A new paper led by the Knowledge Lab ...

Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed new wound dressings that dramatically accelerate healing ...

Setting off smoke bombs is more than good fun on the Fourth of July. The military uses smoke grenades in dangerous situations to provide cover for people and tanks on the move. But the smoke arms race is on. Increasingly, ...

The Colonial Pipeline, which carries fuel from Texas to New York, ruptured last fall, dumping a quarter-million gallons of gas in rural Alabama. By the time the leak was detected during routine inspection, vapors from released ...

Rumour has it that Albert Einstein spent his last few hours on Earth scribbling something on a piece of paper in a last attempt to formulate a theory of everything. Some 60 years later, another legendary figure in theoretical ...

British billionaire businessman Sanjeev Gupta will built the world's biggest battery in South Australia, officials said Friday, overtaking US star entrepreneur Elon Musk's project in the same state last year.

Piezoelectric materials, which generate an electric current when compressed or stretched, are familiar and widely used: think of lighters that spark when you press a switch, but also microphones, sensors, motors and all kinds ...

A novel quantum effect observed in a carbon nanotube film could lead to the development of unique lasers and other optoelectronic devices, according to scientists at Rice University and Tokyo Metropolitan University.

For biologists, a single cell is a world of its own: It can form a harmonious part of a tissue, or go rogue and take on a diseased state, like cancer. But biologists have long struggled to identify and track the many different ...

An unexpected phenomenon known as zero field switching (ZFS) could lead to smaller, lower-power memory and computing devices than presently possible. The image shows a layering of platinum (Pt), tungsten (W), and a cobalt-iron-boron ...

Michigan auditors who conducted a fake "phishing" attack on 5,000 randomly selected state employees said Friday that nearly one-third opened the email, a quarter clicked on the link and almost one-fifth entered their user ...

By analysing a prehistoric site in the Libyan desert, a team of researchers from the universities of Huddersfield, Rome and Modena & Reggio Emilia has been able to establish that people in Saharan Africa were cultivating ...

Photonics researchers at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) have achieved the extra-ordinary by creating a diode consisting of light that can be used, for the first time, in miniaturised photonic circuits, as published ...

Birds do it and so do doughnut-shaped fusion facilities called "tokamaks." But tokamak chirping— a rapidly changing frequency wave that can be far above what the human ear can detect—is hardly welcome to researchers who ...

NASA has powered on its latest space payload to continue long-term measurements of the Sun's incoming energy. Total and Spectral solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS-1), installed on the International Space Station, became fully ...